After listening to Lexicon Valley, particularly their most recent episode Why Is No Among a Child's First Words?, I've chosen to emulate that podcast. Right off the bat, they have a casual, comfortable tone that manages to sound like two friends sharing interesting facts over coffee, and while I won't have a partner to do that with, another technique LV achieves is addressing the listeners like they're there, like it's interactive, and I can certainly attempt that.
Today's lecture revolved around not only just presenting other people's findings, but extending them with your own interpretations, and I think LV presents an excellent formula to follow: State facts. Search even deeper. State facts. Search even deeper. They tighten the topic, but keep the audience universal — they ask a question, provide answers via research, and then discuss those answers, with a mixture of examples from other sources and their own lives.
Here's an abridged outline of some helpful steps they achieve in the No podcast (linked above):
- INTRO: Leads into the essential question by grouping it with a research statistic — a study in which kids who knew what ranged from two to ten words had a largely common knowledge and use of the word No.
- They literally ask the audience "Why?" — involves the listeners at home, inviting them to draw from their own experience; to put words to a usage so everyday and common that they might never have consciously thought of an explanation.
- Presents their findings via another case study — the research breaks down the kid usage of No into three different categories, and with elaborate explanations and examples for each.
- CONCLUSION: Asks some parting questions for the audience to consider and research themselves: Is it a biological or learned thing that the other common words among those 200+ kids were concrete, tangible nouns, words they could touch and identify, whereas No is abstract, reactionary? They even close out the podcast with a joke — one responds with a sarcastic No re: if they're done the episode, which could've seemed like unneeded filler but was in fact another usage of the word No among kids — a make believe one, where they know it isn't appropriate but use it anyway. In doing this, they keep everything after the question relevant and on-topic.
As far as I can tell, LV therefore manages to do what the SPARK website suggests, such as focusing on the "Who?" as listed under Managing a Topic: No is being discussed within the parameters of kid use, rather than every group of humans on the planet, and even with such a closed-in question, they manage to talk for even more than fifteen minutes about just that. So, why not try it with my topic?
I'm not going to do something LV has already covered, but I am going to do something along the No vein. I want to talk about another everyday word that tends to have negative connotations — Sorry — and while I may touch on broader uses briefly, just to give contrasting context, I want to snap-focus to the use of the word among women ("Who?"), and why a lot of us feel so apologetic all the time, and a lot of the time without needing to. I was originally going to make it about people in general, but after hearing from the course, the LV podcast, and SPARK, I realized I had to go much tighter.
Another SPARK technique I think I'll try out is their Plus, Minus, Interesting table, which asks you to make a chart listing not only the pros and cons of your chosen topic, but things that could be interesting about those pros and cons. It's a broad model, however, and its example table uses a pro to the effect of this topic is relevant to the course, and while that would be applicable in a course with one unified study, this is a project that allows everyone to pick their own, so my PMI table would read something more like this structure is relevant to the framework this course encourages, rather than the content. And I'm extremely determined to narrow down my content within that framework!
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